Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could thrown in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood of the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.

If one can get past H.L. Mencken’s harshness (his writing, I note, expanded my adolescent vocabulary to include cad, bounder, bosh, buncome, poltroon, charlatan, and mountebank), one can discover a number of admirable qualities in his prose. Among them I quite like the faux statistic, the technique of comparing two things, or else asserting a near-universality, with unresearched numerical specificity. The device appears in the passage above here: There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac. An acre, eh? Not a hectare, a square click or square mile? Mencken talks as if he had consulted his Atlas of Accomplished Gentlemen to arrive at his astonishing conclusion, but of course he consulted nothing other than his Muse.

The faux statistic instructs the mind to comprehend a particular magnitude; in expending the energy to imagine the size of an acre (how large is my backyard?), the imagination spends more time with the image and therefore finds it more vivid and compelling, even though the ratiocinating faculties demand more (some!) evidence. This trick might cause your college professor to spill half an ounce of red ink in protest, but if your concern is not cautious argument but a more spiritual Truth, there’s nothing more effective than a few made-up facts.

Some of the best writing is about bad writing. This is unsurprising, I think, because the quality of prose cannot be proved with theorems and a slide rule; to establish authority on the subject of good writing versus bad, the author must demonstrate his own skill and taste. Today I’ll share two examples of such linguistic showmanship. The first comes from George Orwell, in his brilliant essay on bad writing called Politics and the English Language. One of my favorite sentences from it concerns the worst of “modern writing”:

It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

I can’t help but to think of this image when I come across some sentence that appears to have the tensile strength of papier mache. Given the resilience of that first image, I was a little disappointed in the second clause; “results” and “presentable”ness don’t fire up any sensory memories for me, and the final “humbug”–a unloved urchin of a word, beautiful in its ugliness–must bear the clause’s dramatic weight.

I think Orwell was trying to achieve an effect more like the following, one of the best linguistic invectives ever written. This passage has inspired many imperfect imitators, Orwell, perhaps, among them; its hyperbole is so electric, its imagery so sensible, its wordplay so unhinged that language itself seems inadequate to express the subject’s verbal turpitude. I refer to Warren G. Harding’s prose, condemned to eternal ignominy by H.L. Mencken, America’s finest wit after Twain. Since I can’t follow it, I’ll end with it. Mencken wrote:

I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.